The switch in ideology is not as surprising as they might think. The RCP was the most ultra of ultra-Left groups, filled with the type of militant who refused to give money to beggars for fear that their charity would delay the inevitable crisis in capitalism. Once the party gave up on Marxism in the 1990s, its critique of "reformist" attempts to, say, protect the National Health Service or restrain multinationals sounded very like the type of conservatism that wants to cut the welfare state to the bone and let big business have free reign. 

But to raise the peculiar parallels between Trotskyists and Tories is to go into a deservedly obscure chapter of British ideological history that few readers will care about. Beyond alerting listeners to Radio 4's failure to tell them that its programmes are packed with representatives of a weird sect, why bother with the BBC's infatuation with the RCP when there are more pressing causes to worry about?

Two reasons occur to me, one political and one journalistic. Politically, it shows how Radio 4 still believes that the far Left is somehow morally superior to the far Right. The BBC's favourite former Trotskyites have not abandoned totalitarianism. Just as neo-Nazis deny the Holocaust and say that liars faked the evidence of the Auschwitz gas chambers, so the RCP denied the evidence of the Serbian massacres in Bosnia and maintained that lying journalists faked the pictures of Bosnian Muslims in concentration camps. From Iran to Zimbabwe, the RCP, or whatever it is calling itself this week, is rarely at the forefront of campaigns against tyranny. My guess is that the BBC loves the RCP: not because Radio 4 is filled with admirers of totalitarianism, but because it is filled with the promoters of sensationalism.

Eventually, all pundits or academics in the public eye learn this the hard way when they receive a call from a researcher for Radio 4 asking them to come on air. They are briefly flattered. But then the researcher insists that they entertain the audience by reducing their position to absurdity and adopting the most extreme caricature of their argument imaginable. If they are not prepared to play the game, the researcher will hang up and they will realise that the five words Radio 4 hate most are "It's more complicated than that".

They never hear them from the RCP. It understands the BBC and gives it the contrarianism it craves. If everyone says social workers ought to protect the vulnerable from menaces, the RCP will say social workers are the real menace. If everyone says the Serbs committed atrocities in Bosnia, the RCP will say they did not. If everyone says the world is round, the RCP will say it's flat. 

I do not know who emerges with less credit from the staged political debates that follow: the BBC producers who demand idiotic posturing or the supposed intellectuals who go along with them.